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Earth’s ozone hole shrinks: What this means for us

Here’s a rare piece of good news about the environment: The giant hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer is shrinking, and has shriveled to its smallest peak since 1988, NASA scientists said.

The largest the hole became this year was about 7.6 million square miles wide, about two and a half times the size of the United States, in September. But it was still 1.3 million square miles smaller than last year, scientists said, and has shrunk more since September.

Warmer-than-usual weather conditions in the stratosphere is to thank for the shrinkage since 2016, as the warmer air helped fend off chemicals like chlorine and bromine that eat away at the ozone layer, scientists said. But the hole’s overall reduction can be traced to global efforts since the mid-1980s to ban the emission of ozone-depleting chemicals.